Further to my previous post about algorithms for authority, Folksonomies: Tidying up Tags is an article in D-Lib Magazine that talks about the problems and possibilities involved with modern folksonomies.
At the moment, many investigations of tag data are in progress, including how tags can be used for searching. As a consequence, development in this field tends to confine itself to methods for improving the quality of the user-contributed tags for this purpose. In practice, this involves promoting commonly-chosen tags above single-use or infrequently used tags by various means, such as user interface enhancements, synonym use and so on. It is possible that the data collected through folksonomy tagging is more complete than we had imagined. Achieving more from that data may be a question of developing an appropriate set of algorithms; in other words, revisiting the data with another aim in mind might reveal usefulness in some categories of “sloppy” tag.
As someone said recently (I can’t remember where), if 2005 was the year of tagging, 2006 will be the year of filtering …
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